The blue light of the monitor was starting to burn into my retinas at 6:45 PM, a time when any sensible person is either halfway through a gin and tonic or yelling at their kids to put their shoes away. I was doing neither. I was scrolling through the corporate careers page, a habit born of equal parts boredom and a mounting sense of being undervalued. That’s when I saw it. The job title was mine. The department was mine. Even the bulleted list of responsibilities was a direct copy-paste of the document I’d refined 15 months ago. But the salary range-that bolded, supposedly ‘transparent’ bracket-started at $95,005 and capped out at $135,005. I checked my last pay stub. I was sitting at exactly $75,005.

My stomach didn’t just sink; it performed a slow, nauseating roll, the kind you feel when you realize you’ve been the punchline of a joke told behind closed doors for years. I’d been at this company for 5 years. I’d received ‘exceeds expectations’ ratings 5 times in a row. And yet, the ‘transparent’ floor for a new hire-someone who would likely spend their first 45 days just figuring out where the bathroom is and how to use the convoluted Slack integrations-was $20,000 higher than my current ceiling.

I spent at least 45 minutes earlier today writing a very different version of this article. It was full of data points and polite suggestions for HR leaders on how to bridge the ‘loyalty gap.’ I deleted the whole thing. It was a waste of space because it treated the problem like a misunderstanding. It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s a strategy. We’ve been told that pay transparency is a revolution for the worker, a way to level the playing field and ensure equity. But if you look closer, through the eyes of someone who doesn’t trust a single word on a glossy brochure, you’ll see that these bands are actually designed to keep you exactly where you are.

The Investigator’s Eye

Paul M.K. would have seen this coming from 15 miles away. Paul was an insurance fraud investigator I worked with years ago during a particularly grim summer in the Midwest. He was a man who lived in the discrepancies. He spent 25 years looking at house fires and car wrecks, searching for the one number that didn’t end in a 5 or the one signature that looked a little too practiced. Paul used to say that the most effective way to hide a secret is to surround it with a million boring, public facts. That’s exactly what salary transparency does. It gives you a range to focus on so you stop asking about the individual. It turns your worth into a bracket, and once you’re in a bracket, you’re just a line item on a budget that needs to be optimized.

“

They don’t tell you they won’t pay; they tell you that according to the table, your loss is only worth 55 percent of what you think it is. The table is the authority. You can’t argue with a table. Salary bands are the corporate version of those insurance tables.

Paul M.K., Former Insurance Fraud Investigator

When you go to your manager and ask for a raise that reflects your actual output, they don’t have to look you in the eye and say ‘no.’ They just point to the band. ‘You’re already at the 85th percentile of your range,’ they’ll say with a scripted sigh. ‘Our hands are tied by the transparency policy.’

The Loyalty Tax: A Calculated Loss

This is the ‘Loyalty Tax’ in its most naked form. Companies have realized that it is statistically cheaper to let an experienced employee walk out the door and replace them with a more expensive new hire than it is to raise the wages of the entire existing workforce to market rates. It sounds like madness-until you look at the 5-year projections.

They are betting on your inertia. They are betting that you won’t notice the job posting, or that if you do, you’ll be too tired to update your resume and start the grueling 5-stage interview process elsewhere.

Authenticity vs. Standardization

In a world of corporate doublespeak, finding something that actually delivers on the promise of ‘what you see is what you get’ is rare. It’s why people gravitate toward brands like KPOP2 because they actually mean what they say, unlike these HR manuals. When a brand or a person is actually transparent, they don’t need a 55-page slide deck to explain their ‘methodology.’ They just show you the reality and let it stand. But in the corporate world, ‘transparency’ has become a synonym for ‘standardization,’ and standardization is the enemy of the high-performer. It’s a way to ensure that no one is paid too much, even if they are doing the work of 5 people.

Paul M.K. once told me about a guy who tried to claim his stolen watch was worth $15,005. The guy had a receipt and everything. But Paul noticed the ink on the receipt was a type that hadn’t been manufactured 5 years ago when the watch was supposedly bought. The ‘transparency’ of the receipt was a lie designed to bypass the investigator’s intuition.

That’s what these salary ranges are. They are a paper trail designed to make a fundamentally unfair process look like a meritocracy. They want you to believe that if you just work harder, you’ll move to the top of the band. But the top of the band is a mirage. It moves every time you get close to it, or worse, it stays exactly where it is while inflation eats 5 percent of your purchasing power every year.

The Liberating Realization

I’m looking at that job posting again. I’ve been staring at it for 25 minutes now. There’s a temptation to call my boss right now and demand an explanation. But I know what the explanation will be. It will be a series of words like ‘comp-ratio,’ ‘external benchmarks,’ and ‘budgetary cycles.’ It will be a polite version of ‘we don’t have to pay you more because you’re already here.’

We live in an era where we crave authenticity because we are surrounded by these hollowed-out versions of it. Real transparency would be admitting that the salary band for my role hasn’t been adjusted for the cost of living in 5 years. But they won’t say that. They’ll just keep publishing the ranges, confident that the numbers ending in 5 will look enough like ‘data’ to keep us quiet.